


A Brief History of Love, revision no. 357

by Poetry



Series: Who Are We? [3]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alien Planet, Community: wintercompanion, Diary/Journal, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, Long-Term Relationship(s), M/M, Open Relationships, Reconciliation Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-10 16:10:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4398581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and the Captain spend lifetimes apart, but live through eternity together. When they join company in the TARDIS once more, they record their adventures in the Book. This time, for the Captain, entry number 357 is going to be one of the most painful to write.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Brief History of Love, revision no. 357

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the wintercompanion Summer Holidays Fest, to the prompt: "weaving / medicine / A Brief History / Quechua."

Usually it’s the Doctor who comes for the Captain, but this time, it’s the other way around. The Captain is ready to see the Doctor again, and the Doctor doesn’t come, so he seeks him out.

Before he goes, Wenigo asks him why he wants to see the Man on Fire again. “You hate him. For good reason, too. Why not wait for him to come apologize?” (The Captain will write in the book later: _Wenigo’s people, the Caärrhen, put a lot of stock in the giving and taking of forgiveness, with stately formal rituals of Apology._ )

“I’ve hated him before,” the Captain says, shrugging. “I’ll hate him again. Having to see him… it has nothing to do with how I feel.”

“Then what is it about?” asks Wenigo, ears pressed flat, subdued.

“You know my secret, Wenigo,” the Captain says. He doesn’t make eye contact – that would be very rude, to a Caärrhen – but he looks very intently at a space in the air between them, the compromise he came to after living among these people for so many years. “I don’t even know how long I’ve lived, by now. I’ve been so many people. The Doctor is the only one who knows who I really am. That’s why I always have to go back to him. So I don’t forget.” 

He’ll miss the Caärrhen, Wenigo most of all. But one day, he’ll go back to the book, read about his time as the Weaver of the Caärrhen, and remember, and smile.

The Captain likes to think he finds the TARDIS by instinct, some anchor she has in his chest that never comes unmoored. The TARDIS-tracking program on his vortex manipulator is, after all, imprecise. Comets, satellites, dark matter anomalies – those are easy to track, but living things with minds are never so simple. He uses his TARDIS tracker to chase leads, and he guesses, and he likes to think the guesses come from some part of him that _knows_. But that may just be his sad little wish for some kind of permanent imprint on a body that throws off wrinkles, scars, tattoos, and everything else, with time. 

The first lead he follows takes him someplace humid and choked with wickedly thorny vines. The Captain immediately starts sweating inside the black bodystocking he wore among the Caärrhen. (They believe in form-fitting clothes, which show that you have nothing to hide; the Captain heartily approved.) He sees the TARDIS through a curtain of the vines, and puts his face as close to them as he dares. 

A tall man steps out, ridiculously overdressed in a long coat and scarf. The Captain smiles. He’s seen this Doctor before, wild-haired and beautifully distant. The Doctor looks around, and doesn’t see the Captain, but a grimace passes across his face when he turns in the Captain’s direction. The Captain accepts this with grace; it’s what always happens when he meets the Doctor from before the time they met. But he’d better go before the Doctor gets curious. Which should happen in 3… 2…

“Hmm,” the Doctor says. “I wonder what a temporal anomaly like _that_ might be.” He calls back through the open door of the TARDIS. “Leela! Come on out, I think we’ve got a proper adventure in store this time!”

The Captain activates the Vortex manipulator and rides its familiar nauseating swirl to another time and place. 

He is near the top of a mountain. He can hear rain, but it’s falling on the other side of the mountain. On this side there’s only the howl of fierce cold wind and the livid glow from three orange moons. The sweat under the Captain’s bodystocking instantly turns frigid, and tears spring to his numb face. The TARDIS is a thing of perfect right angles in the jagged landscape. Beyond her, he sees a figure crouched in a thicket of tough little bushes hunkered down among the rocks. 

The Captain walks up to the TARDIS and leans against her, getting a little shelter from the wind. The figure’s head rises and turns toward the Captain. He knows this face well – it’s the same one the Doctor had when they last parted: pointy, red-brown, scarred. The Doctor stands up. His hands are full of tiny white flowers. The light of the moons is not enough to reveal his expression. The Captain’s teeth start to chatter.

The Doctor stuffs the flowers in the pockets of his long white cloak. He comes to the Captain, pulls him in by the shoulders, and they do what they always do when they reunite. The Doctor whispers the name the Captain was born to, the long-lost name of a Boeshane river. Then the Captain does the same in return, the Gallifreyan syllables clumsy and harsh in his throat, like hacking coughs.

The Captain is glad to get this part over with. They are not the people those names were meant for.

The Doctor gets out his key and opens the TARDIS door. The Captain feels the warmer air from inside the TARDIS and stumbles in, trembling with relief. The control room is small and cozy these days, with round cushioned seats around the console and golden walls that pulse in and out as if with a giant’s breath.

The Captain leans against one of the warm golden walls and heaves out a long, shivering sigh. Then he looks at the Doctor under hooded eyes and says, stiffly, “What were you doing there?”

The Doctor takes a few flowers from one pocket and displays them on his palm. “Raw ingredient for some of the medicines in the TARDIS infirmary.”

“Medicines.” The Captain’s jaw tightens. “The Caärrhen could have used some of those after you burned their towers down.”

The Doctor’s hand tightens around the tail of his long dark braid. He closes his eyes and says nothing.

“Do you know what they call you? The Man on Fire. Because you survived the fire, even though so many of them didn’t. The burn victims…” The Captain remembers the fire that burned in their dreams, the way their skin screamed every night with the pain. 

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said, opening his eyes. His grip was still tight around his braid. “You should have called me. I would have come to help. You know how I am, Captain. It’s too easy for me to forget what comes next after I… happen to places.”

“I was too angry.” The Captain thinks of the Doctor, gathering flowers in the moonlight while he said goodbye to a people still in pain, and his vision goes reddish with fury. “I still am.”

“Do you need the book?” the Doctor says. “You can go first.”

“No. You go ahead. I need to clean myself up.”

The Captain takes the first proper shower he’s had in years, sloughing off dirt that feels embedded layers deep in his skin. He shaves, clips his hair, trims his nails, then goes to the infirmary to check for worms and other nasties. He wraps himself in a kimono-like robe of dark blue silk, then lets the TARDIS guide his steps to the library. 

The Doctor’s at a beautiful old-fashioned writing desk, complete with inkwell and quill pen. He takes out a knife, trims the quill, and goes on writing, the pen’s tip scratching an uneven rhythm on the pages. He’s not done yet, but the Captain knows he can’t sleep, can’t eat, without taking his turn with the book. He wanders the library shelves, reading random selections of poetry to clear his mind, until the Doctor says, “Go ahead,” in the rich, cultured voice of his current body.

The Captain approaches the writing desk. The Doctor stands at the threshold of the library. “Can I bring you tea?” he says. 

It’s been so long since he had tea. He’s angry, but not enough to refuse this small kindness. “Sure.” He keeps moving toward the desk. The book’s cover reads _A Brief History._ It used to be a history of the universe, before the Time War. Then, like so many histories, it became blank, its story undone. Until the Doctor and the Captain decided, one day, to fill it once more. 

_A Brief History_ is bigger on the inside, of course. The Captain flips back a bit and finds that this will be his 357th entry. He opens a drawer in the writing desk and finds, to his relief, a ballpoint pen with green ink. He finds the first blank page and begins to write.

_The Captain. Entry 357._

_For the last forty years of my personal timeline, I’ve been the Weaver of the Caärrhen. “Weaver” is the best translation from their language, anyway. The Caärrhen are mildly telepathic; they share their dreams. One particularly sensitive person in every generation is supposed to hold the fabric of the collective dream together, so it doesn’t dissolve into chaos. The last Weaver died in the Inferno, and there was no one sensitive enough to replace xyr, so when I came along, I became the Caärrhen’s first alien Weaver._

_I’ve held groups of people together before, kept that collective spirit from falling apart, but never so literally…_

At some point in his writing, the Captain looked up and realized there was a teapot, cream pitcher, cup, and saucer at his elbow. He poured, added a dash of cream, and carried on. By the time he was done, the last of the tea was cold, and a bitter aftertaste lingered in his mouth.

He’s done with his entry. Now he can go back and read the Doctor’s. 

There’s no mention of the Caärrhen. He shouldn’t be surprised – their timelines are rarely synced when they meet – but he is disappointed. Deep down his heart still pleads for understanding, to know what the Doctor was thinking when he burned the Seven Towers and left their ashes to smolder in the uncaring desert.

But this part of the entry is interesting.

_After she helped me convince the time travelers to leave Cuzco, Kusi stayed with me as a traveling companion. I was surprised. It wasn’t easy for her to hear that the great Incan Empire would be utterly destroyed by foreign invaders one day, but it didn’t make her afraid. She wanted to see the history of Cuzco, and its future. So I took her on a tour, going forward and back. I learned quite a lot of Quechua along the way. Beautiful language._

The Captain reads about the Doctor and Kusi’s adventures through the rise and fall of the Incan Empire, colonialism and post-colonialism and the New Latinoamerica. As far as the Captain knew, the Doctor hadn’t been to Earth for centuries in his personal timeline, and neither had the Captain – its history already groans with all the lives they’ve lived there. But now the Doctor can blend in places and times where he would have stood out too much in his earlier, paler incarnations. 

_I took her back often to see her family. Every time, she looked at her city through new eyes after seeing a different time in its past or future. Sometimes she appreciated her city in ways she could never have imagined before. Other times she cursed it for everything she knew it could be, but wasn’t, not in her time._

_I’m not sure when on these visits home, exactly, I started to fall in love with Kusi’s uncle, Yupanki. I always liked him. He was a jeweler, with keen eyes and long, precise hands. At one point in Cuzco’s past, Kusi and I found a jewel paid for a king’s ransom that we thought might be a fake. We brought it to Yupanki to appraise. He knew right away it wasn’t a real diamond, and he pointed out a series of flaws in the facets that made me realize it was actually a Golgafrinchan distress beacon. I thanked him again and again, but he just smiled and said that the best thanks he could get was seeing his niece so happy again._

_He never came along with us on our adventures, even when they were in his present day. But he helped us whenever he could, in his own quiet way, cooking us delicious pachamanca, taking us to the temples for offerings or just to enjoy their beauty, laughing at our stories, holding Kusi as she cried. I started looking forward to taking Kusi home almost as much as I looked forward to our next trip._

_I remember the day when I was watching him work, sorting through a box of gems for the best cuts, holding each of them up to the light. Kusi was at her mother’s, trying to reconcile for maybe the tenth time, though at that point even I had to admit it didn’t look like it was going to happen. I thought about how long it had been since I’d loved someone who was tied down to a single place and time. The Captain does this all the time, I thought. Did I still have it in me? And I remembered something he wrote down in the book once, his 225th entry: “Never turn down the chance to love someone. Even if we really do live forever, there’ll never be enough chances.” So I took it._

_I won’t write down any details of the sort the Captain would like to read, because there weren’t any. Yupanki wasn’t particularly interested in sex, as it turned out. When we were together, we would go on long hikes through the mountains, and at the summit we’d look out over the view, holding hands, his head leaning against my shoulder._

_In the end, Kusi chose to leave the Cuzco of her time, a city that would never let her be the diplomat she wanted to be, and a mother who wouldn’t speak to her because she chose to leave a husband who didn’t respect her. She chose 22nd century Cuzco instead, and when she said goodbye to Yupanki, I could see in his eyes that he didn’t want to see me anymore. Not because he hated me for Kusi’s decision, but because I’d be a reminder of what he’d lost._

_I’ve lived long enough that everything reminds me of what I’ve lost. It’s got to the point where that doesn’t really hurt anymore. I think about what I’ve lost, and I smile, because the universe is a ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, and all of it is still out there somewhere, even if I never see it again._

The Captain flips back to that entry, number 225. The Doctor’s entry reminds him that he hadn’t really gotten the chance to love any of the Caärrhen, except for Wenigo, his apprentice Weaver. They had all felt too much like a burden. After spending every day struggling to unknot the Weave of their nightmares, he couldn’t face them by moonlight. It was just too much to bear. But entry 225 – that had been a good lifetime, the Captain thinks, reading back through it. Maybe his best life without the Doctor he’d ever lived. 

He’d served as a temple courtesan for the Goddess of Sacred Flesh at Accordia Station, teaching the divine pleasures of the body to anyone who asked. The sex had been great, sure, but even better was teaching a woman that she could still make love to her husband who couldn’t walk anymore, a teenager that they could make themself feel good without touching the body parts that didn’t feel quite theirs.

The Captain flips further back, stopping at other entries about cleaning up after the Doctor’s messes, all the way back to the time before all the names he’d taken weighed so heavily he’d had to cast them all off, back to when he’d called himself Captain Jack Harkness. There were other names before that one, but he’d never written them down, and only the Doctor knew them anymore.

The Doctor comes in and leans against the doorframe. “May I read yours?”

The Captain stares deep into his dark eyes. “You’d better.” Usually they each leave the room while the other reads the book, but the Captain stays for this. He watches the dismay and bitter regret cross his face, just as he’d wanted ever since he’d stood in the ashes of the Seven Towers and heard the story of the Man on Fire who’d burned down the towers that kept them prisoner, then climbed into a blue box and disappeared. But he finds that he doesn’t relish the harsh grimace of the Doctor’s remorse as much as he does the soft openness of his sympathy. The Doctor closes the book with a thump and looks at the Captain.

“The only person you kept close was Wenigo, and even xyr not as close as you might have. That’s not like you.”

“And you let someone on the slow path get close to you,” the Captain says. “That’s usually what I do.”

“Seems like we traded places, this life.”

“Not completely. It was still me dealing with your aftermath.”

“We’ll trade that too. Some other life.”

“I don’t want to trade. I want both of us to finish what we start. I want both of us to love people on the slow path. If we stop, we’ll forget why people live in a straight line at all, and if we forget that…”

“Then we keep on breaking people’s lives and leaving the splinters behind,” the Doctor finishes.

A silence twines between them like a cat around their legs, rubbing at them and starting to purr.

“I’m not sure I can sleep tonight,” the Captain admits, finally, shooing the silence away, knowing it will come back. “It’ll be my first time dreaming my own dreams in forty years.”

“I could keep you company in yours,” the Doctor offers.

The Captain just shakes his head. “Let’s go to bed. It’s been a while, but I seem to remember that you have other ways of helping me sleep.”

The Doctor’s eyelids droop lazily. “I do.” His hand wanders over to clasp the Captain’s hand. “I want to remember your body. Find out what’s changed.”

The Captain doesn’t regenerate, but his body does drift, given enough time. His tastes change. His gait becomes more forceful, or slower. The spots that make him gasp shift across his skin. He feels like a planet sometimes, tectonic plates shifting inside him over geologic time. 

The silence is back, soft and warm and pressed up against them as they walk to the Doctor’s room, arm in arm. In his room, under a wildly patterned blue ceiling (that’s certainly new), the Captain draws the Doctor close and breathes in his ear, “I want it long and slow. The kind of sex where you wake up in the morning and wonder for a second if it was a really good dream.”

“Good,” the Doctor says. “That’ll give me all the time I need.”

The Captain bends his head down – the Doctor is quite a bit shorter than him, this time around – and trails hungry kisses along his jaw, and the back of his neck, brushing his braid out of the way. The Doctor shivers. There are so many things the Captain remembers about this body, he thinks, that he could draw an atlas of his skin, write an encyclopedia of his pains and pleasures. The taste of his sweat is more familiar and dear than the taste of the seaweed cakes his mother made for him as a child.

The Doctor unties the Captain’s robe, starts kissing from his mouth all the way down, inch by careful inch, moaning continuously as if his tongue were a cock, rutting wantonly against the Captain’s skin. The Captain, for his part, gropes at every part of the Doctor he can reach, coiling his smooth braid between his fingers, digging his fingers into the notches of his spine, caressing the soft insides of his knees. The Doctor presses too-soft kisses to the Captain’s cock until he’s desperate to fuck any part of the Doctor’s body with any part of his, and he gasps, “Come on, Doctor, if I don’t get inside you I’ll…” He bucks his hips so his cock brushes suggestively against the Doctor’s cheek. “ _Please_.”

“Don’t want you to fuck my mouth,” the Doctor says darkly. He sits up and moves forward so his ass is right over the Captain’s face. “Want you here.”

“Yes, _yes_ ,” the Captain chants, and pulls the Doctor down, spearing him open with his tongue. He’s warm and smooth inside and his legs are clamped around the Captain’s face. He feels like the Doctor is all around him, surrounding him completely, and it’s so good. He licks and licks until the Doctor is open and wet and trembling.

“I’ll take my time riding you,” the Doctor says raggedly. “As long as you can stand it. Longer.” He pulls away, and the Captain groans at the loss, until he scoots back along the bed and without any warning, rolls a condom on the Captain with one hand (where did he get that from?) then guides him inside with the other.

The Captain remembers how much this version of the Doctor loves this, seeing the Captain stretched out beneath him, filling him up. The Doctor watches him with hooded eyes and slips two fingers in the Captain’s mouth, matching the rhythm of his cock, an ouroboros of fucking.

It’s slow, just like the Captain wanted, achingly slow. The Doctor rolls his hips gently, pulses his fingers in and out of the seal of the Captain’s lips, like a fourth heartbeat, slower than theirs, just enough to keep them moving. The Captain’s need for the Doctor, his joy in him, feels so big, so full of history, that it could never fit in the book. It couldn’t even fit in the TARDIS, and that was why he had to keep leaving, to give all that love in him a place to go. But for now, it was right here, and the Doctor could hold it all inside him, somehow.

The Captain closes his eyes and holds onto the Doctor’s hips hard enough to bruise, even on his brown skin. Tomorrow he will see them there, the history of this night written on his body. The Doctor sighs and clamps his thighs harder around the Captain’s waist. The Captain rubs soothing thumbs over the bruises he just made and whispers soundlessly around the Doctor’s fingers in his mouth: _I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you._

His orgasm is not so much a climax as a letting go. The Doctor smiles when he feels the Captain go still with it, then rolls gently off, letting the Captain finish him with a steady hand once he has his breath back.

Even surrounded by the Doctor’s warmth and his silence, it takes the Captain a long time to find sleep. Finally, he feels the TARDIS send questing tendrils into his mind, creeping in at the edges. The Captain lets her. Maybe he’s not ready to dream alone after all.

The TARDIS dreams of the Doctor and bright-eyed Kusi stumbling through her doors, covered in flower garlands and singing “El Cóndor Pasa.” She dreams of the Doctor loud and femme, stern and graying, an awkward but dangerous youth, spiky-haired and besuited, armored in sarcasm and leather. She dreams of the Captain old and tranquil, shattered and forgotten, bitter and desperate for love, young and guilty and swept up in awe. She dreams of screaming fights and rivers of tears and long passionate embraces and running into the TARDIS breathless and flush with adventure.

_That’s why we never write in the book about the times we spend together,_ the Captain thinks, in between one dream and the next. _We don’t need to. You remember them for us._

_Yes,_ the TARDIS thinks back, in her own wordless way. _What shall I remember for you next?_

The Captain wakes, then. There’s only a warm spot beside him where the Doctor used to be. He doesn’t mind. He rolls out of bed, his mind blank like a page, ready for the next chapter.


End file.
